"Despise the mean Distinctions [these] Times Have Made":
The Complexity of Patriotism and Quaker Loyalism in One
Pennsylvania Family

Karin A. Wulf,
American University

Like other civil wars, the American Revolution asked
ordinary people to chose between two extraordinary positions.
The Revolution forced competition among colonists'
allegiances: to England and the King, to colonial homes and
families, and even to religious convictions. To support the
war was to refute the King, to oppose the war was to deny one's
homeland. For Pennsylvania Quakers (members of the Society of
Friends), decisions about whether to support or oppose the war
were further complicated by the inherent conflict between two
deeply held beliefs: their pacifist principles and their
desire to protect and support the colony founded by William
Penn.

As in the Civil War, or a century later the Vietnam
War, rival allegiances divided many families. Even the family
of such famed Patriots as John Dickinson and Charles Thomson
was beset by internal dissension. Dickinson and Thomson, key
members of Pennsylvania's moderate and radical Patriot factions
respectively, had married cousins from a prominent, powerful,
and wealthy Quaker family. Mary Norris Dickinson and Hannah
Harrison Thomson were granddaughters of Isaac Norris I, one of
Pennsylvania's leading Quaker merchant-politicians of the early
eighteenth century, and Mary Norris was one of the richest
heiresses in Pennsylvania when she married John Dickinson in
1770. Family relations were strained but not severed by
divergent political positions held during the Revolution;
within this one extended family were prominent Patriot
politicians, Loyalists who were jailed by the Patriots and
whose property and person were under threat from American mobs,
and many disgusted with the excesses of both sides in the
conflict. This diversity of views did not go unnoticed.
Dickinson's and Thomson's political views placed Loyalist
members of their family---aunts, uncles, and cousins by
marriage---in the peculiar position of both eschewing the
Patriot cause and hoping for its triumph if only to guarantee
the security and prosperity of their kinfolk. In addition,
Dickinson's efforts to chart a moderate course, and the
Loyalism of his in-laws, only served to make him suspect in the
eyes of other Patriots.

Unlike the many Loyalists who eventually fled the civil
war, most Pennsylvania Quakers remained in the colonies only to
find themselves subjected to the wartime passions of both
sides. While Quakers at first supported patriotic resistance
to the British, they soon grew uncomfortable with the radical
nature of the movement. Quakers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere
joined most colonists in opposing the British taxation policies
of the 1760s and 1770s. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the
Townshend Duties of 1767 occasioned protests, including strict
boycotts of British goods. As the poet Hannah Griffitts wrote,
Quakers would "Stand firmly resolved & bid [English Minister
George] Grenville to see/That rather than Freedom, we'll part
with our Tea." Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic heralded
the repeal of the Stamp Act and most of the Townshend duties.
After these initial forays into protest politics, however,
Quakers became uneasy with the Patriots' increasingly radical
and sometimes violent responses to British actions. The Tea
Act of 1773 was followed by the Boston Tea Party, and the
passage of the Coercive or Intolerable Acts closing Boston's
port was quickly succeeded by the formation of the First
Continental Congress. This seemed too much. Quakers saw that
Patriots' interest in reconciliation with the British was
waning, and their fears of imminent warfare proved too quickly
well founded by the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and
Concord.

First articulated during the English Civil War of the
mid-seventeenth century, the Quaker Peace Testimony committed
members of the Society of Friends to nonviolence. Believing
that violence was a product of the kind of "lusts of men . . .
out of which lusts the Lord hath redeemed us," Quaker founder
George Fox declared in 1684 that "the Spirit of Christ will
never move us to fight and war against any man." The Peace
Testimony previously had caused Friends political trouble in
Pennsylvania, especially during the Seven Year War when other
Pennsylvanians were calling for an armed response to Indian
provocations on the colonyUs frontier. Quakers in the
Pennsylvania Assembly had resigned rather than accede to those
demands. The Revolution thus not only raised anew concerns
about Quakers' potentially contradictory commitments to
Pennsylvania and pacifism, but also intensified them.

For Quakers, finding a middle road would prove a
frustrating task. At first they tried simply to advocate
conciliatory measures. At home they published statements
condemning all (English and American) breaches of law and the
English constitution; in England they tried to broker
reconciliation with the king. Their efforts were to no avail.
With the Revolution underway, in September of 1776 the largest
organization of Quakers in America---the Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting---formally directed its members to observe strict
neutrality. This meant that Quakers should not vote or take
oaths of loyalty to support either side, should not engage in
combat or pay for a substitute (a not uncommon practice in that
era) and should not pay taxes to support the war effort. The
responses of Quakers to these requirements varied. Probably
the majority, torn by conflicting loyalties, sympathized with
both sides. Many remained tacit Loyalists, supporting without
materially aiding the King's army. Other Quakers renounced
neutrality and actively sided with the Patriots. In
Pennsylvania almost 1,000 Quakers were disowned during the
course of the war, the large majority of them for taking up
arms. One group even formed their own separate denomination,
the Free Quakers or Fighting Quakers, whose leader Timothy
Matlack served on political committees alongside such radicals
as ex-Quaker Thomas Paine.

Largely because of this variety of positions, the
perception among both Patriots and Loyalists was that Quakers
could not be fully trusted. In the Delaware Valley, where for
most of 1776 and 1777 first the British and then the Americans
held sway, Quakers were punished by each side for their
supposed allegiance to the other. The Norris-Dickinson family
felt the wrath of both Americans and British. While the
Americans occupied Philadelphia, for example, Patriot mobs
ransacked many Quakers' homes. A cousin of Mary Norris
Dickinson watched from a neighbor's home as "the mob attacked
our house . . . . breaking the windows . . . . they came a
second time to our houses & pounded with stones. . . . they
were determined to have our house down." Then in September of
1777 the Patriots arrested twelve Quakers and exiled them to
Winchester,
Virginia, because of the potential threat they posed to the
American position. Among the exiles, confined until late April
of the following year, were three Norris relations. In turn,
the British burned the Norris family home of Fairhill just
north of Philadelphia, where John and Mary Norris Dickinson
lived after their marriage, specifically because it belonged to
"that Patriot Dickinson."

The harsh repercussions of perceived political
loyalties made any position of moderation hard to maintain, and
highly suspect. John Dickinson and, to a lesser degree, Charles
Thomson felt this reality very keenly. Even though he was
never anything but an ardent Patriot, in the eyes of some
rebellious colonists Dickinson's brand of political moderation
was tarred with the brush of Quakerism, and by extension the
taint of Loyalism. Actually, he came late to any appreciation
of Quaker political positions. Dickinson had long opposed
Pennsylvania's Quaker Party in the provincial assembly, and
was justly famous for his early opposition to the taxation
policies which had flamed the fires of Revolution. His set of
twelve essays, the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767),
gave thoughtful voice to many colonists' views of the Townshend
duties: no revenue-producing taxes were constitutional unless
the peopleUs representatives had voted for it. Without
colonial representation, Parliament could justify only
regulatory legislation. Despite this early and very public
opposition to British policies, Dickinson was at heart a
moderate. He worried about measures that would lead to a
head-on confrontation with the British. For the first time he
began to labor in earnest with Quakers who shared his
concerns. As a delegate to the First Continental Congress in
Philadelphia in 1774, he worked with the city's leading Quakers
to produce a temperate result. More radical Patriots, however,
interpreted Dickinson's actions as the result of meddling
Quakers, whom they accused of pressuring him via his Quaker
wife. It is true that one of those Quakers to whom Dickinson
turned for consultation was James Pemberton, a close kinsman of
Mary Norris Dickinson who had given the young heiress intensive
and invaluable counsel after the death of her father and before
her marriage. Pemberton ended up as one of the Quakers exiled to Winchester by
the
Americans. How must John Dickinson have
felt as his wife's relation, and his sometime partner in
moderation, was treated thus? When Dickinson suffered a
political setback in 1776 (he was not returned to Congress
after a nasty battle over the nature of Pennsylvania's new
state constitution) he laid the blame squarely at the feet of
those who saw his marriage to a Quaker and his new-found
sympathy with some aspects of Quaker positions as evidence of
his insufficiently patriotic views. He could hardly help but
take these things personally.

Other members of the family were similarly torn.
Quaker poet Hannah Griffitts was cousin to both Mary Norris
Dickinson and Hannah Harrison Thomson. She corresponded
regularly with both, although she felt a special kinship with
Mary Dickinson as the two had lived together at Fairhill for
more than a decade before the latter's marriage. During the
war, Griffitts expressed unwavering support for her two cousins
even as she constantly derided what she saw as the extremism of
the American position. Griffitts lashed out at Thomas Paine,
calling him a "Snake beneath the Grass" whose radical message
drowned out the voices of "moderate M[e]n." At the same time
she was not much easier on the British, often finding their
behavior in Philadelphia boorish and overly militaristic. She
viewed the Meschianza, an elaborate festival the British in
Philadelphia arranged to honor the departing General Howe, as
indicative of a "deep degeneracy of nature." When it came to
her cousins, Griffitts tried to be diplomatic. She remarked to
Mary Norris Dickinson only that she thought the Patriots had "Push'd things to
an Extremity." She passed on the news to another cousin that,
after decamping Philadelphia during the city's British
occupation, Hannah Thomson was quite "Happy in a social society
of sentiments alike, [because] 'Not one Tory suffer'd to
breathe the air of Baltimore.'"

Mostly Hannah Griffitts deplored the situation which
had led to the division of her family and her society. In her
writings she anguished over the tragedies of war and the
disunity which had claimed Pennsylvania. In a poem about the
first major battle of the war, the Battle of Long Island, she
wrote movingly of the impact of "wars devouring rage" and hoped
(vainly) for a speedy resolution.

The theme of resolution and reconciliation marked other of
Griffitts' wartime poems, including one in which she
sympathized with the family of a fallen American soldier. The
real disaster, as she saw it, was the "mean Distinctions times
have made." The Revolution, as she knew all too personally, had
the potential to "break each sacred Tye, each social Band/and
in affliction plunge the parent Land."

During the Revolution Americans advocated a variety of
different political views. While it is important to recognize
the distinctions between the Patriot and Loyalist positions, it
is also important to note that there were many people who
sympathized with aspects of each position. While some families
were torn apart, others found that their bonds of affection and
mutual obligation were severely tried, but not broken, by
conflicting political convictions. The extended family of John
and Mary Norris Dickinson represents these difficulties in
microcosm. In the realm of politics and warfare, ardent
Loyalists and avid Patriots traded sharp insults and ultimately
mortal blows. In the realm of the family, such extremity could
be tempered by sympathies engendered by close contact with and
knowledge of "the enemy."

[A fuller account of this family during the Revolution, as well
as many of Hannah Griffitts' Revolutionary era political poems,
can be found in Catherine La Courreye Blecki and A. Wulf, eds.
Milcah
Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary
America (1997). On Quakers and the Revolution, see Arthur
Mekeel, The Relation of the Quakers to the American Revolution
(1979). For more about Loyalists, see Robert Calhoon, The
Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781 (1965), and Anne
M. Ousterhout, A State Divided: Opposition in Pennsylvania to
the American Revolution (1987).]